page_title: British Army during World War I
section_title: Artillery tactics
hierarchical_section_title: British Army during World War I / Doctrine / Artillery tactics
caption_attribution_description: Español: La artillería británica bombardea las filas alemanas durante el mes de agosto de 1916. English: 8-inch howitzers of the 39th Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery conducting a shoot in the Fricourt-Mametz Valley, August 1916, during the Battle of the Somme.
context_page_description: The British Army during World War I fought the largest and most costly war in its long history. Unlike the French and German Armies, the British Army was made up exclusively of volunteers—as opposed to conscripts—at the beginning of the conflict. Furthermore, the British Army was considerably smaller than its French and German counterparts.
  During World War I, there were four distinct British armies. The first comprised approximately 247,000 soldiers of the regular army, over half of which were posted overseas to garrison the British Empire, supported by some 210,000 reserves and a potential 60,000 additional reserves. This component formed the backbone of the British Expeditionary Force, which was formed for service in France and became known as the Old Contemptibles. The second army was provided by the approximately 246,000-strong Territorial Force, initially allocated to home defence but used to reinforce the BEF after the regular army suffered heavy losses in the opening battles of the war. The third army was Kitchener's Army, comprising men who answered Lord Kitchener's call for volunteers in 1914–1915 and which went into action at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
context_section_description: Prior to the war, the artillery worked independently and was taught to support the infantry to ensure a successful attack. In 1914, the heaviest artillery gun was the 60-pounder, four in each heavy battery. The Royal Horse Artillery employed the 13-pounder, while the Royal Field Artillery used the 18-pounder gun. By 1918, the situation had changed; the artillery were the dominant force on the battlefield. Between 1914 and 1918, the Royal Field Artillery had increased from 45 field brigades to 173 field brigades, while the heavy and siege artillery of the Royal Garrison Artillery had increased from 32 heavy and six siege batteries to 117 heavy and 401 siege batteries.
  With this increase in the number of batteries of heavier guns, the armies needed to find a more efficient method of moving the heavier guns around. (It was proving difficult to find the number of draught horses required.) The War office ordered over 1,000 Holts caterpillar tractors, which transformed the mobility of the siege artillery. The army also mounted a variety of surplus naval guns on various railway platforms to provide mobile long-range heavy artillery on the Western Front.
  Until 1914, artillery generally fired over open sights at visible targets, the largest unit accustomed to firing at a single target was the artillery regiment or brigade. One innovation brought about by the adoption of trench warfare was the barrage—a term first used in the battle of Neuve Chapelle in 1915. Trench warfare had created the need for indirect fire, with the use of observers, more sophisticated artillery fire plans, and an increasingly scientific approach to gunnery, where artillerymen had to use increasingly complicated calculations to lay the guns. Individual guns were aimed so that their fall of shot was coordinated with others to form a pattern; in the case of a barrage, the pattern was a line.
  The creeping barrage was a barrage that lifted in small increments, perhaps 50 yards (46 m), so that it moved forward slowly, keeping pace with the infantry, who were trained to follow close behind the moving wall of their own fire, often as close as 55 yd (50 m); infantry commanders were encouraged to keep their troops as close to the barrage as possible, even at the risk of casualties from friendly fire. A creeping barrage could maintain the element of surprise, with guns opening fire only shortly before the assault troops moved off. It was useful when enemy positions had not been thoroughly reconnoitred, as it did not depend on identifying individual targets in advance. The idea behind the creeping barrage was that the infantry should reach the enemy positions before the defenders had time to recover, emerge from shelters, and man their positions. On the first day of the battle of the Somme, the barrage outpaced the infantry, allowing the defenders to recover and emerge from their dugouts, with disastrous results for the attackers. The creeping barrage demonstrated its effectiveness a year later, in 1917, during the battle of Arras. A weakness of the creeping barrage was that the infantry was subordinated to the artillery schedule, while the infantry commanders had less control over the tactical situation and were therefore in danger of forgetting how to manoeuvre their troops around the battlefield. The importance of the barrage was such that traditional infantry tactics, including a reliance on the infantry's own firepower to support its movement forward, was sometimes forgotten.
  Once the infantry had reached the German trenches, the artillery shifted from the creeping barrage to the standing barrage, a static barrage that would protect the infantry from counter-attack while they consolidated the position. A variant was the box barrage, in which three or four barrages formed a box—or more often three sides of a box—around a position to isolate and prevent reinforcements being brought up into the front line. This was normally used to protect trench raids, although it could also be used offensively against a German unit. Another type of barrage was the SOS barrage, fire
caption: 8 in (203 mm) howitzers of the 39th Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery conducting a shoot in the Fricourt-Mametz valley, August 1916, during the battle of the Somme.
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